Snip from Amelia Vance (@AmeliaIVance) from NASBE on the latest student privacy legislative initiatives and opinions.

Some student data aggregation fits under the NIST Big Data working group’s framework.

NASBE will be holding its annual webinar with DQC on student privacy and the 2016 legislative session on May 26th from 3-4pm EST. NASBE will also be releasing an associated publication. Vance will send out the RSVP link on Tuesday with the formal release of The Standard. While you wait for the webinar, you should pay close attention to two soon-to-be laws which deviate from what we’ve seen in prior legislative sessions from Colorado and Connecticut.

NASBE will also be doing a series of regional boot camps on student privacy training for teachers and administrators, and it wants to know what your state or organization is doing so we can highlight it! Vance asked colleagues to contact her with any resources (or ideas about what needs to be included in training).

For any lawyers who are interested, Ms. Vance will be presenting on a May 19th webinar for the NSBA Council of School Attorneys (CLE credit provided).

The court concluded that the combination of a unique device identifier and precise geolocation is personally identifiable information that may identify a “person as having requested or obtained specific video materials.

The potential scope of the case is considerable, as InfoLawGroup warns. It may be even larger when IoT scenarios are considered. They write that:

Businesses that publish mobile apps (or websites) that show video materials and the third party service providers that may receive information about the content and those who view the content (particularly precise geolocation data) should carefully follow the case when it returns to the trial court.

Why is this data quality story appearing in the Big Data story stream?

Because Big Data’s persistence, in the absence of archiving, means that errors made in data acquisition persist beyond the processes and people responsible for the collection. When the data is critical to an individual, this data quality problem looms larger than in some smaller data scenarios.

Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian architect with a doctorate from Stanford University, knows from personal experience that they have a compelling point. Ibrahim is the only person since 9/11 to file a court challenge that ultimately removed her name from the watch lists. It took her almost a decade to prevail in court and even that victory has proved phyrrhic. While a federal judge agreed that her inclusion on the no-fly list was groundless, she remains unable to obtain a visa that would allow her to visit the United States even to attend academic conferences. A close look at her case by ProPublica provides dramatic evidence of what was argued this month in Washington: It is indeed remarkably easy to get on the list and nearly impossible to get off.

While most would agree that the problem is not new (GIGO), Big Data amplifies the impact and can make remedies more difficult, especially as the time from collection to use increases.

Heads-up, privacy compliance. WNYC’s On the Media looks at the recently passed California SB-178 electronic privacy regulation, and its implications for consumers and information technology providers. For example, police will need a warrant in some circumstances where they previously had unfettered access to cell phone data.

[In May 2015] the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sent a letter to the bankruptcy court presiding over RadioShack’s supervised asset sell-off suggesting a compromise that would allow RadioShack to sell its database of information from 117 million customers.

If there was ever any doubt about the importance of data as asset, the Radio Shack data scenario removed it. The customer list was likely worth more (at least to some prospective purchasers) than real estate or “tangible” inventory.